Best Screenplay 1955

[Greg]

It's certainly worth noting that, uncharacteristically, the writers vetoed a full eighty percent of the Best Picture nominees eligible in this category.

Does anyone know if, at least after the very early years, this was the only time that just one Best Picture nominee had its screenplay nominated?

[The Original BJ]

It's certainly worth noting that, uncharacteristically, the writers vetoed a full eighty percent of the Best Picture nominees eligible in this category. I guess I'd say the writers came up with a marginally better slate, expunging the most bloated Best Picture nominee while adding a much stronger effort that went surprisingly un-nominated in the main race. But a lot of the other replacements strike me as lateral moves.

There were, certainly, superior options, though many of them were revisionist choices appreciated more in hindsight (The Night of the Hunter, All That Heaven Allows, Rebel Without a Cause), or foreign (Sansho the Bailiff, Wages of Fear, among others.)

Love Me or Leave Me settles pretty quickly into a repetitive affair -- Day and Cagney fight, then Doris sings, then she usually (inexplicably) sings again. Wash, rinse, repeat. I don't see much more than a standard show business bio here. And the ending makes one a little queasy -- Cagney has spent the whole movie abusing his wife, and at the end she still bends over backwards to help him out, all because, deep down, he really did love her? That's a message that's really hard to take as a happy ending sixty years on.

You can see how Blackboard Jungle would have had some kick at the time -- it's obviously addressing a myriad of social problems of the era, from racial integration to the troubles of disaffected urban youths, and it has a decent enough narrative spine to remain fairly watchable today. But much of it comes off as fairly superficial -- Glenn Ford gets control of his class by showing one kid with a knife who's boss? -- and it would be hard to vote in the screenplay category for something with storytelling that feels so reductive now.

Bad Day at Black Rock has its merits, but I agree that it's a lot stronger as a piece of direction than a work of writing. John Sturges gets a lot of suspense out of the slow roll-out of information during the first portion of the movie, but eventually, I started to feel like the movie's entire strategy became a case of less being less. And once the entirety of the backstory was revealed, I thought the movie deflated quite a bit -- it just wasn't compelling enough a destination to justify the long, drawn-out journey it took to get there.

Marty is definitely the work of a writer -- Paddy Chayefsky had a knack for writing dialogue that stood out, but also felt appropriate for the kind of workaday characters he usually portrayed, and there are some solid exchanges between Borgnine and Blair, and Borgnine and Mantell. My problem, though, is that the whole movie feels so tiny to me, and Marty's arc from the beginning of the film to the end feels so inconsequential, that I just have never found it as notable a movie as many did at the time. I've never seen the original tv version, but the big screen treatment doesn't feel any more significant than the average Playhouse 90 episodes I have seen.

So I go pretty easily for East of Eden. It's very possible the underlying material just speaks to me at a primal level -- for kids growing up in California, John Steinbeck was in many ways OUR writer, and much of my youth involved visiting many of the places I read about in his novels, most notably the towns of Monterey and Salinas, which serve as the setting here. But I also think this film version is a very successful adaptation -- focusing on the second half of the book makes for a far more manageable cinematic story than the novel in its entirety would have been, and some of the script's more florid writing nonetheless feels appropriate for such a turbulent account of familial conflict. By the time it reaches its conclusion -- with Dean sitting by Massey's bedside -- I think it reaches a pretty great level of emotional power. I think this is pretty easily the most ambitious and fully successful film on the ballot, and I recognize that with an Adapted Screenplay vote.

[ITALIANO]

I'm also not sure that East of Eden - an admittedly legendary movie - IS a great screenplay. (I am sure though that the first half is quite lethargic - the second half is much better). Maybe it's not even a great movie - affecting, yes, extremely well acted and rather well directed, but maybe not great. I could still vote for it here by default - there's nothing truly exciting in sight, though I guess that Blackboard Jungle was, for the times, a quite daring piece of screenwriting, and Bad Day at Black Rock has an interesting central idea (but the development isn't as interesting). But I have never voted for Paddy Chayefski, who, like it or not, was - and for decades - one of the most important writers in American cinema - a star in his field. We all know that Marty isn't especially profound, but it must have seemed unusually "fresh" when it first came out, and as a character study it shows an empathy which I wouldn't completely dismiss. Plus, Marty is a writer's movie in a way that the other four nominees even too obviously aren't. So Marty is my pick.

The Story and Screenplay category is - frankly - quite embarassing. The Seven Little Foys is mosty famous here for having been the first and only Hollywood vehicle for Milly Vitale, a then popular Italian actress who, despite the box-office success of this movie, never became an international star. She DID made international headlines though - a few years later she married a strange American businessman who was also a Muslim, and the dynamic duo was involved in a big scandal which connected Iran, the US, and - obviously - petroleum. Anyway, Milly Vitale's story is more interesting than four of the nominees - or at least three, because It's Always Fair Weather, while ultimately a harmless 50s musical, has two or three good ideas. I'm not sure that Tati's movies or more generally his very typical sense of humor have aged that well, but clearly Mr Hulot's holiday is by far the most inventive of these five.

[Big Magilla]

Inside Oscar tells me this is the year Wages of Fear was eligible, and that’s a clear qualifier for me, as well. I’m less certain about the eligibility of Diabolique or Rififi, but they’d be stronger than most if not all nominees.

Films Eligible in 1955 Originally Released in a Different Calendar Year:

The Belles of St. Trinian’s (1954)
The Dam Busters (1954)
Doctor in the House (1954)
The Heart of the Matter (1953)
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953)
Phfft (1954)
The Pickwick Papers (1952)
The Purple Plain (1954)
The Sheep Has 5 Legs (1954
Ugetsu (1953)
Vera Cruz (1954)
The Wages of Fear (1953)

Films Originally Released in 1955 But Eligible in a Different Calendar Year:

The Colditz Story (1957)
Diabolique (1956)
French Cancan (1958)
The Ladykillers (1956)
Lola Montes (1960)
Miracle of Marcelino (1958)
The Night My Number Came Up (1956)
Ordet (1959)
Pather Panchali (1959)
The Prisoner (1956)
Quatermass Xperiment (1956)
Richard III (1956)
Rififi (1957)
Smiles of a Summer Night (1958)
Stella (1957)
The Trouble with Harry (1956)

[Mister Tee]

Oy, the 50s. I’m in the same position I was in 1956: one category where I can’t vote due to truancy, another where I can but have no enthusiasm.

I thought I’d seen The Seven Little Foys, but then I realized I’d seen a TV adaptation of it with Eddie Foy Jr. as his father and the (pre-top 40) Osmond brothers as the kids. On the obscure chance seeing the original film would sway my judgment, I must abstain.

I find all of Eleanor Parker’s nomination vehicles pretty dismissable (though Caged has its camp value), and Interrupted Melody is the most dismissable of all. A prototype of the biopics we still hate unto this day.

It’s many years (close to 50) since I saw The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, but my memory is of a solid enough courtroom clash between Rod Steiger and Gary Cooper, with the hindsight kicker of how correct and prescient Mitchell turned out to be. I’d be curious to see the film again some day

I only caught up to It’s Always Fair Weather in the past year or so. It certainly has more interesting undertones than your average musical – barely beneath the surface, there’s a good deal of post-war angst, and rising dissatisfaction with the suburban dream-life (a dissatisfaction that had a lot to do with making the 60s such a turbulent decade). Unhappily, this interesting stuff is contained within a musical whose songs are unilaterally undistinguished and whose storyline often veers into the buffoonish. So, while I can admire the effort, I’m not terribly impressed with the overall result.

I guess, if I were voting, I’d end up at M. Hulot’s Holiday, though 1) as with The Red Balloon, I’m not disposed to choose non-dialogue films as screenplay winners and 2) Tati in general is not to my taste – I’m at best mildly amused by his stuff, never driven to truly pleasurable laughter. Since I’m not voting, I don’t have to delve very far into that conundrum.

Alternatives for adaptation are myriad. The Night of the Hunter has seemingly become the retroactive consensus choice for best (or among the best) movie of 1955, and it clearly deserved mention here. Inside Oscar tells me this is the year Wages of Fear was eligible, and that’s a clear qualifier for me, as well. I’m less certain about the eligibility of Diabolique or Rififi, but they’d be stronger than most if not all nominees. And The Big Knife and To Catch a Thief are decent candidates, as well.

I’ve already dissected Love Me or Leave Me in the Motion Picture Story thread. If I didn’t favor it in that paltry group, you can be assured I won’t opt for it here.

The Blackboard Jungle, like the legendary song that opens it, was close to cutting edge then but comes off hopelessly dated today. The film was an early entry on the hot subject of Juvenile Delinquency (that very term, common when I was a kid, sounds positively Victorian now), but, given the many-many more nuanced treatments of that theme in the decades since, it all feels fairly primitive (likewise its treatment of racial issues). It’s not an unwatchable film, but certainly nothing timeless.

I like Bad Day at Black Rock more than some here, but even I see it as more a feat of tension within a limited framework than any special piece of writing. The back-story is, in fact, one of the least distinguished elements.

I can argue the positive or negative on Marty depending on my mood that day. The dialogue is, from any realistic vantage point, pitched hopelessly over the top. The idea that “Dogs like you and me have to stick together” is supposed to endear Clara to Marty – rather than, say, making her burst into tears – tells you how far into fantasy-land Chayefsky is taking the audience. But it must be said that he stays quite consistently within those unreal boundaries, and that, if you accept his premise, the film works rather winningly. I don’t think the film’s victory here is any outrage.

But I’m also not as over the moon about East of Eden as some of you. To me, it’s guilty of a certain over-the-top-ness of its own. The arrival of the method on-screen certainly liberated movie acting, but, while it produced some legendary performances in the finest works, it also – in lesser Williams/Inge works, and in films like this -- offered a fair amount of melodramatic acting. Steinbeck’s novel, with its ostentatious Biblical invocation, was an invitation to excess to begin with, and the film, while it contains many genuine moments (courtesy of Dean, Harris and Van Fleet), is a hit-and-miss affair for me.

I end up split between the last two in the realm of “best, I guess, but not great”, and may take a while to decide how to vote.

[Precious Doll]

Easy picks here:

Adapted: East of Eden
Original: Mr. Hulot's Holiday

Omissions: Night of the Hunter, All That Heaven Allows, Kiss Me Deadly, The Deep Blue Sea, The Ladykillers, Animal Farm, Summertime, Picnic, Oklahoma, The Trouble with Harry & Were No Angels.

[Big Magilla]

Adapted

Like the Academy, I have already given a writing award to Love Me or Leave Me which seemed the best laid out story of the nominees for Best Motion Picture Story. Of the actual screenplays, however, I think it's the weakest of the nominees.

I also think the overwrought Blackboard Jungle is also a weak entry here. I would give their slots to Summertime and the criminally ignored The Night of the Hunter.

The remaining nominees are all worthy. Bad Day at Black Rock is clean and lean. Marty nicely expands the original teleplay. Best of all, though, is Paul Osborn's adaptation of the last section of John Steinbeck's East of Eden. This enduring masterpiece was the year's best film despite the myopia the Oscar voters must have been suffering from. Part of it was due to the Kazan's direction, the acting and the cinematography but the screenplay was the film's strongest suit. It easily gets my vote.

Original

The winner, Interrupted Melody was a by-the-numbers show biz bio that pulls out all the stops but is not nearly as interesting as either Love Me or Leave Me or I'll Cry Tomorrow, but those were not originals.

The Seven Little Foys is more fun, but comes across as a poor man's Yankee Doodle Dandy complete with a cameo by James Cagney as Geoge M. Cohan.

So much of The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell feels like a filmed play that it's surprising to find that it is indeed an original. Otto Preminger's other 1955 film, The Man With the Golden Arm was better structured, but that was an adaptation.

Mr. Hulot's Holiday is really quite insubstantial as a screenplay. It's virtually plotless with a few amusing sequences, but to me it's like watching someone's home movie of their vacation, more fun for the participants than the captive audience.

The only possible winner for me is Comden's and Green's wonderfully funny spoof of early television. It's Always Fair Weather, indeed.

[Kellens101]

What were the best screenplays of 1955?